Infographic: The Commuter Student

Written By

Annie

This year, OOHLALA surveyed over 45K students across 175 institutions and discovered some of the biggest challenges, trends, and insight surrounding today's students. Based on our findings, we discovered that commuter students in particular face several unique challenges in comparison to students who reside on-campus.

For example, 1 in 3 students who commute 60 minutes or longer to school report not being engaged at all. These students often choose their classes based on how they will fit into their schedule, rather than what classes interest them the most, in order to optimize their time on campus.
Commuter students also rarely attend events due to inconvenient timing, or conflicting scheduling. If a student has the choice to wait around for hours to attend an event or simply go home, she/he will usually choose the latter. The biggest consequence of not participating in these events is having the commuter student feel removed from the campus community, which is why institutions must make "active efforts to ensure that people living off campus feel included."

Another interesting discovery we made is that commuter students only experience a 57% satisfaction rate when it comes to orientation, in relation to the 70% satisfaction rate that on-campus students reported.
Discover out all of our findings on commuter students by downloading the full infographic here.